It’s from my understanding the er cannot denying seeing you even if you can’t or refuse to pay. So in the event of a very large bill and the hospital does a charity right off how does the hospital make money. In addition, it is my understanding that if you don’t care about your credit unpaid medical bills won’t impact you since it isn’t a government expense (like student loans) so they can’t garnish wages. So how do they make money on these cases? Also my mom is a doctor and has said that right offs are very common since insurance only covers a percentage. Why would a hospital do this since they don’t get paid?
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They likely sell the debt to debt collection agencies, in where the right to receive collections is transferred to whoever purchased it. This is the best way to recover as much of the out of pocket billings that they incur, but to be honest the hospitals still don’t make much money.
The most profitable divisions of hospitals are usually the cancer centers. This is because insurance is most likely to pay out for the expenses related to cancer. Yep, it sounds fucked up but makes a lot of sense.
This is why medicine and doctor visits have such a high and growing price attached, as any amounts not charged through insurance are basically written off immediately, and they try to bill as high as they can so that they can get something out of insurance or other methods that don’t bill the patient directly. The profit margins are increased in other divisions to make up for losses in the charity case scenarios, as well as unpaid receivables.
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